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Spontaneity and the modern office

Companies are continually looking to make their working environment as functional as possible. However, in this quest for optimal efficiency, are they inhibiting the creativity of their staff?

Karl Sharro, a director of London-based firm PLP Architecture, says that while technology allows employees to arrange their work more flexibly it has also reduced the “spontaneous interaction” which is the best thing about daily office life.

This became clear to Deloitte, a recent client of PLP Architecture, when discussing designs for their Amsterdam headquarters. Deloitte’s new home, says Sharro, has been described as the world’s most sustainable building, and – in his own words – is “freakishly technological…as soon as you scan and come through the building to your office, it adjusts the temperature, the lighting, everything to your requirements. But then Deloitte realised, with all of this technology, there is still a great need for face-to-face interaction, and not necessarily in a formalised sense.”

Both Sharro and Deloitte realised that spontaneity is crucial for business innovation, a theme explored by Eli Pariser, chief executive of media curation hub Upworthy, in 2011. Pariser believes that even personalised Internet searches limit the freedom of our imagination, a phenomenon he called “the filter bubble”, the title of his bestselling book. “In the filter bubble, there’s less room for the chance encounters that bring insight and learning. Creativity is often sparked by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics and you get the nonstick pan and the induction stovetop.”

In an office context, Pariser’s ideas mean there needs to be a space where, say, the software developer can easily bump into the graphic designer. To provide such a space, Sharro found himself looking back to far earlier times. His firm is increasingly receiving requests to devise laboratories with what he refers to as “a concept of a Greek-style Agora” – that is to say, with room for the employees to mill about, and strike up chance conversations that might lead to breakthroughs.

It is ironic that, in the middle of the modern office, this ancient ideal – a large public square in the middle of town, where philosophers would meet to talk about their ideas – is alive and well. One of Thailand’s largest telecommunications providers, dtac, has a Conversation Pit and a Freeform Room to encourage such happenstance.

To their minds, remote working does not provide the same nuance; a view shared by Clive Wilkinson, an architect. Wilkinson, who devised Google’s head office in Silicon Valley, told Dezeen magazine: “we’re not as virtually well-connected as we think. The amount of information that’s conveyed by looking people in the face and seeing their body language and seeing their eyes in person, hearing the tone of their voice and the subtleties of the communication, is enormous. By using something like Skype, the quantity of that information is reduced exponentially. You get 15 percent of the depth of that information.”

Steve Jobs, naturally, was a man aware of the value of the right office layout. Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has noted that when Apple’s co-founder designed the new headquarters for Pixar “he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur.” Isaacson has also observed that “one of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that ‘people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together’.”

Perhaps, then, it is this desire for such togetherness which explains why several leading companies now provide so many creature comforts for their employees; from relaxation rooms to play areas, with tables for pool and ping-pong. After all, the more time that colleagues can be encouraged to spend under the same roof, the greater the possibility that they may come together for a Eureka moment.

However, as Wilkinson points out, this is not yet a norm in the working environment. In his estimation, some 75 to 80 percent of American offices are “cubicle land”, which he describes as “the worst – like chicken farming. They are humiliating, disenfranchising and isolating.” Fortunately, he sees this situation slowly improving, with a trend “to open up the workspace and increase accessibility and transparency, and choice and opportunity”. Maybe, then, we are moving towards a world where the majority of offices will be designed with spontaneity in mind, resulting in carefully-orchestrated chaos. If this is indeed the case, then the future, at some level, will have Ancient Greece to thank.

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